Mike Adams, the "yoga mat chemical," and the chemical apocalypse

Back in December, I was excited. The reason I was excited was because everybody's favorite über-Libertarian, New World Order conspiracy theorist quack, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, had made an announcement. That announcement was that on January 6, 2014 Adams would announce astonishing "scientific findings" about food that would "revolutionize" nutrition and health. Given Adams' past history of doing hilariously off-base things with scientific instruments, such as putting Chicken McNuggets under a microscope and being amazed that things look a lot different when highly magnified, resulting in his misinterpreting dust and probably flecks of spice to be bizarre and alien fibers responsible for Morgellon's disease, I was hoping for, as I put it, comedy gold and blog fodder galore.

I was disappointed.

January 6 came and went, and all I saw over at Adams' repository of all things that quack, NaturalNews.com, were reports from the hilariously named Forensic Food Lab at NaturalNews.com finding heavy metals and all sorts of "toxins" in not just grocery store food, but organic foods and "superfoods." Holy hell, even vegan foods and seaweed and sea vegetable products were not immune from Adams' incompetent use of expensive scientific equipment to generate terrifying numbers for concentrations of lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals. However, it soon became apparent to me that Adams was clearly using his newfound ability to misuse actual scientific instruments to "find" horrifying levels of metals and various scary chemicals in a lot of the supplements and "superfoods" that you'd normally expect him to support. It was then that I started to realize that Adams' lunacy wasn't really about belief. Not really. Not this time. Rather, it was about eliminating his competition by testing their products and finding them to be "loaded" with various scary sounding chemicals. He even went so far as to publish an unstintingly funny (unintentionally, of course) article entitled Heavy metals discussions reveal striking state of denial in the minds of some natural products consumers, in which he had the chutzpah to state, "You can't pick and choose which laws of chemistry you want to be true," and then follow the section of his article following that title with a claim like, "There is also convincing evidence that at least some people are able to truly live off nothing more than sunlight and air."

Uh, the laws of chemistry and physics say that living off of nothing more than sunlight and air is impossible for a mammal like humans. Mikey really needs to take his own advice. But I digress...

Yesterday, the old Mikey was back. Gone was the Mikey ruthlessly trying to eliminate his natural foods competitors by "revealing" horrible chemicals and heavy metals in their products, and back was the utterly nutty conspiracy true believer that we've all come to know and love. The old Mikey was back in the form of an article entitled Battle for humanity nearly lost: global food supply deliberately engineered to end life, not nourish it. To drive the point home, right next to the title is a picture of a man wearing a hazmat suit and a gas mask. As if that weren't enough, the second paragraph basically reiterates the title, saying that because of his wondrous scientific experiments Mikey has come to the conclusion that humanity is nearly lost. Don't worry, though. He's only getting warmed up:

My lab has uncovered scientific proof that substances are intentionally formulated into dietary products to drive consumers mentally insane while causing widespread infertility, organ damage and a loss of any ability to engage in rational, conscious thinking. These toxic substances are being found across the entire food supply including in conventional foods, organic foods, "natural" products and dietary supplements.

This goes far beyond the mere contamination of foods with heavy metals -- a subject which is grave all by itself. Rather, this is about the intentional formulation of toxic substances into products consumed by the masses on a regular basis.

The result is what you see unfolding around you right now: mass insanity, incredible escalations of criminality among political operatives, clinical insanity among an increasing number of mainstream media writers and reporters, widespread infertility in young couples, skyrocketing rates of kidney failure and dialysis patients, plus a near total loss of rational thinking among the voting masses.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria! Or so sayeth Mike Adams:

The long-term effects of this widespread food poisoning phenomenon will be the utter downfall of modern human civilization for numerous reasons ranging from economic non-sustainability to environmental destruction and the global rise of political violence as we are seeing right now in Kiev.

As more and more lab results have been documented here at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, it has become increasingly apparent to me that humanity cannot survive the mass engineered poisoning of the food supply.

Who knew Mike was so important to humankind? And what are these horrific chemicals that are poisoning us all, turning us into mindless zombie drones serving the pharmaceutical machine, plugging us into it much like the hapless humans were plugged into the Matrix. Key among these chemicals, apparently, is the now-infamous "yoga mat" chemical azodicarbonamide. You might recall that Subway buckled under pressure to remove this food additive from its bread because of a protest trumped up by a blogger named Vani Hari, better known as the "Food Babe." You remember the Food Babe, don't you? She's a particularly dim advocate of "natural" foods and remedies who first came to my attention when my good buddy Mark Crislip so amusingly deconstructed her particularly bad arguments in favor of skipping the flu vaccine last fall. About this horrible chemical, Adams rants:

The now-infamous "yoga mat chemical" used by Subway in their breads is also widely used across the fast-food industry. McDonald's, Chik-Fil-A, Wendy's, Arby's and many other restaurants also use the chemical azodicarbonamide which is linked to cancer. Importantly, this is not a contaminant. This is an ingredient which is intentionally added to the recipes in order for the chemical to be consumed by the masses.

There is no logical reason why chemicals like azodicarbonamide need to be added to recipes of fast food breads and buns. The chemical serves no necessary functional or nutritive purpose. It seems to exists solely for the purpose of delivering the chemical to hundreds of millions of consumers by blending it into popular fast foods. The sandwiches in which this chemical is found are merely delivery mechanisms for toxic substances that harm human biology.

This is the dumbest form of "guilt-by-association" I've ever heard from a quack. Seriously, Mike, what's wrong with yoga mats? Don't you like yoga? Or do you only use natural, organic yoga mats made only from all-natural materials, like cotton. (If that's the case, I hope you wash them regularly. All that sweat from a good yoga workout. Yuck.) Certain basic chemicals are used for lots of purposes, ranging from industrial uses to plastics to pharmaceuticals to foods. In this case, the the chemical, azodicarbonamide, is what's known as a maturing agent. Basically, when it's added to flour, it makes bread dough rise better. It also improves the handling properties of doughs, yielding drier, more cohesive doughs that are more pliable, hold together better during kneading, and machine better.

Moreover, azodicarbonamide arguably not even in the final product. According to this article, once flour is wetted with water, reaction with azodicarbonamide with the constituents of flour is rapid. In the experiments described, it only took 30 minutes for all the azodicarbonamide to disappear, with trace amounts left. By 45 minutes, there weren't even trace amounts left. These guys even labeled azodicarbonamide with 14C radiotracer to determine where the azodicarbonamide ended up found that the azodicarbonamide is rapidly converted to biurea, which itself is demonized based on toxicology studies from the 1960s in which rats and dogs received diets containing up to 5% or 10% biurea. The animals died with massive, multiple kidney stones, bladder stones, and chronic pyelonephritis (inflammation of the kidneys). The stones were made of biurea crystals. Basically, in this study, the investigators gave the animals so much azodicarbonamide that it crystallized in their kidneys in the form of stones. Let's just put it this way, 10% is roughly equivalent to 100,000 ppm, and the highest concentration of azodicarbonamide used in flour is 45 ppm, or 2,222-fold less than the maximum these animals were being fed. But it's even less than that, given that almost no one's diet consists of just bread and baked goods.

Other aspects of azodicarbonamide frequently cited by fear mongerers like the "Food Babe" (and, of course, Mike Adams) include the observation that the chemical is a pulmonary irritant. That's an argument that workers at plants synthesizing azodicarbonamide should wear masks and that asthmatics shouldn't breathe it in, but it's not an argument not to use it in food. It's just like the case of formaldehyde in vaccines, actually. Just because formaldehyde is used in embalming fluid and to fix tissue and is toxic at high exposures does not mean that trace amounts in vaccines are harmful. They're not.

I know I just digressed a bit, but this whole "yoga mat chemical" nonsense has been irritating me for a while, and Mike Adams just gave me an excuse to address it. Let's get back to his pure looniness. I laughed out loud when I read this passage:

At our atomic spectroscopy lab, we have confirmed trace levels of aluminum in regular atmospheric air, confirming the fact that all agricultural soils are being inundated with aluminum which is literally falling out of the sky. This is not merely aluminum in our laboratory air, as many labs contain aluminum floors or furniture, causing an unusually high aluminum concentration in laboratory air. Rather, parts per billion concentrations of aluminum have been measured in regular atmospheric air sampled far from any building or laboratory. The result of this phenomenon is that aluminum levels are rising in nearly all soil-grown crops from which everyday food is derived. While aluminum is far less harmful than lead, cadmium or mercury, the repeated accumulation of aluminum is believed to be tied to degenerative brain disorders across the population.

Congratulations, Mike. You spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a lab to find out that aluminum is everywhere. It's the most abundant metal and third most common element in the earth's crust. It makes up 8.1% of the earth's crust by mass. It's everywhere and in almost everything. Human beings evolved with it. At the concentrations typically found in foods and water, it's quite safe, and even high intake of aluminum from antacid for gastrointestinal ailments has not been reported to cause any adverse effects.

Of course, Mike can't finish without invoking apocalyptic imagery, along with Nazis. He compares this "food apocalypse" to World War I (chemical weapons, natch!) and World War II, pontificating that "today's chemical weapons are deployed via the food supply." Referring to the human race becoming a "race of near-mutants," Adams firmly grasps the crazy and charges right off the deep end with it:

What the United States Air Force did to Dresden in World War II via high-elevation bombing runs, the global chemical and food conglomerates are now doing to the world populations via the drive-thru window. But there are no bombs dropping out of the sky and there are no firestorms lighting up the cityscape at night. Instead, the silent, ignorant masses are simply marched to their deaths, one meal at a time, almost like a cargo train full of "useless eaters" clicking and clacking its way to Auschwitz.

On the way to their own deaths, of course, they pay the mandatory tolls to the pharmaceutical giants, hospitals, cancer clinics, doctors and health insurance mandates. Much like victims of Nazi genocide had their gold fillings pulled out of their mouths before they were gassed to death, today's mainstream consumers are emptied of their bank accounts, assets and insurance policies before finally being discarded by the system.

Because food additives are exactly like the Dresden fire bombing and the Holocaust. And Auschwitz. Especially Auschwitz. I'm really surprised that Adams axercised a little restraint and didn't throw in the Rape of Nanking or the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for good measure.

Adams finishes with a plea for everyone to grow their own food. Of course, this sort of solution is rarely possible except for well-off entrepreneurs like Adams. There's another issue, too. If the soil is "contaminated" with aluminum and all sorts of other metals that have been in the soil since before the dawn of agriculture, one wonders how growing one's own food would obviate this chemical holocaust that is in what passes for Adams' mind being inflicted upon the world.

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Yeah, drive the consumers insane. Great business model. How can people buy your product if they can't find the front door? Paranoid? Much?

Um....where to begin with Mike "We're all gonna die" Adams. "skyrocketing rates of kidney failure and dialysis patients" No Mr Adams this is not the case. I have worked in dialysis for 12 years. I work with epidemiologists, Cardiovascular Surgeons, Nephrologists, Urologists daily. The USRDS (United States Renal Data System) does not show "skyrocketing" rates of kidney failure. It is moving along a predictive increase. As people are living longer on dialysis, the "baby boomers" are getting older and behavioral related diseases (HTN, CVD, DM Type II, Morbid Obesity), the incident rates are in fact increasing but according to a predictable pattern. Mr Adams ignorance of science makes him very scared of natural phenomenon.

I will quote Lewis Black when he addressed Glenn Beck's fear mongering: "Glenn, the Nazis are everywhere. And you're not safe! So here's what you do and take it from me, my people have been through this before: First, you've gotta find an attic. Then hide there for the next three years, and whatever you do, don't make a sound. We'll let you know when it's safe to come out."

toxicology studies from the 1960s in which rats and dogs received diets containing up to 5% or 10% biurea.

I'm picturing myself a regular meal with entrée, main dish and dessert, with the little roll of bread on the side being made entirely of biurea. That should represent about 5-10% of the meal, and that's indeed quite a lot.
That should be a bit difficult to swallow, on all levels.

aluminum which is literally falling out of the sky

[laughing] comedy gold.
[thinking] a few years ago, I didn't know about dust being made mostly of aluminium oxide. I learned it on this very blog. I may have forgotten it from my high-school days.
[sad] A number of people will fall for this scare because they don't know this little fact.

incredible escalations of criminality among political operatives, clinical insanity among an increasing number of mainstream media writers and reporters, [...], plus a near total loss of rational thinking among the voting masses.

Evidence of these people's insanity: none of them believe in Mike Adams' greatness.

Orac, I doubt that he spent " hundeds of thousands of dollars" for his lab equipment:
earlier, when he first started up on this kick, he wrote that he bought a machine ( I forget which one- perhaps something about oxygen levels/ it had mucho mercury in it when it arrived by mail) worth thousands for 100 USD at a surplus website from the U of Michigan.

People like Mikey are desperate to attract consumers to their websites/ webcasts in order to sell them things.

Here's a little tidbit I heard the other day- courtesy of Gary Null**-
he cited a survey of listeners to his radio show ( not sure if he meant via the internet, land-based or both - not sure who did the surveying- as his own 'research' is craptastic at best/ he mentioned e-mail responses):
it seems that his potential audience ( therefore customers?) are attracted because he supplies (so-called) health information AND political/ social/ economic fearmon...I mean *news* - both of which are not available elsewhere.(
I wonder _why_ it's not available at other media.

He divided the aforementoned groups into broad age categories- with the older one being more interested in the woo and the younger more concerned with conspiracies.

If any of this is true, perhaps it's an attempt to attract younger people who might then also buy their dreck. Notice the material is tailored to appeal to anti-establishment types- "You've been lied to by the powers-that-be-
Rebel and Fight the Power!"
There is an anti-government as well as anti-corporate drivel-OBVIOULY the media is totally compromised and entrenched in support of both government and corporations. They know how youth hate corportations. Thus they stress ther own 'investigative reporter', 'scientist' and 'rebel messiah' aspects rather than the fact that they OWN corporations!

** he's back on land-based radio- fund-raising and trying to keep the debt-ridden NY Pacifica station from being leased/ sold- supposedly they have about 2 months to raise money
to turn things around.

you see i do ms quite a lot and the one thing that really is everywhere is silicone, dimethicone. You know, lipstick and lube.
regular peaks 70 odd apart.
wait for the plot to lubricate the world to death..

Somehow, it went viral this week- When it was pointed out that BPA (if you consider BPA to be an issue) isn't even in K-Cups, the author continues to scare people by saying that BPA "is only one of many estrogenic materials in present food grade plastics."

And when someone questions her credentials (a degree in quackery from the National College of Natural Medicine), she blames the bad reputation of Naturopathy on non-accredited practitioners and argues she's much better trained.

It's funny the whole aluminium hysteria; given that it's been a major component of soil for as long as there's been soil, you'd think you couldn't get any more 'natural' than that.

Also, if there was some grand conspiracy to make money by poisoning people to give them cancer, you'd think they'd use something other than very very weak carcinogens at best to do this. They could presumably very easily use potent carcinogens like 5-bromouracil and benzopyrene. They're apparently going to all this trouble just to give maybe a few dozen people cancer, which will clearly make them a fortune.

Quoth Mikey: There is also convincing evidence that at least some people are able to truly live off nothing more than sunlight and air.

There are people who claim to do so, but I'm not aware of any such claim that holds up to scrutiny. Jasmuheen (nee Ellen Greve) won the 2000 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for claiming that Breatharianism is a viable diet. That notion would be excellent fodder for a Friday Dose of Woo entry, if Orac hasn't covered it already.

RE skyrocketing kidney failure we have already passed a plateau of patients coming to dialysis, The concern now is that the clinic infrastructure to provide dialysis may now be over built.
I'm far from a disinterested party I've lived with kidney failure for 20 years, most of it on dialysis.

There was a grand conspiracy to make money by giving people cancer: it's called the tobacco industry. Fortunately, the U.S. government publicized the dangers, and various levels of government as well as private organizations have acted against the conspiracy. There's a long way to go, but a much smaller fraction of the population is paying for cancer sticks than did so fifty years ago.

Why didn't this vast, amorphous conspiracy block the various surgeon generals' reports? How come it's easy to find out what radon in the basement will do to your lungs? Whatever became of radium-painted watch dials?

Over the past several years, Mikey has paraded a series of products and services across NN.com in order to get his followers to part with their hard-earned cash:
supplements based on green-lipped(?) mussels, Surthrival (tm) products, supplies for survivalists, Superfoods, Clean Chlorella (tm) organic GMO-free foods avaiable by mail (Green Polka Dot Box), films, Inner Circle (tm) lecture series, "television" shows with a chiropractor, "tooth soap", a line of shampoos and conditioners, land for sale in Eucador ( he claimed otherwise), etc.

Next should be a line of heavy metal free supplements and nutritional woo powdered proteins and phyto-nutrients.

Maybe he can pick barium as his next alarmist heavy metal. It's hard to avoid seeing that when you make ICP-MS measurements, since it's naturally falling off the gypsum ceiling tiles.

Of course I give no credence to this guy's quackery, but I wonder all the same about the future of the human race and of this planet, given our penchant for unrestrained population and economic growth. We could easily see a future like the movie Idiocracy depicts, where the idiots outbreed those of intelligence.

Or perhaps a world where everything is dying or contaminated, like you might find in a short story by Paolo Bacigalupi. His collection Pump Six and other stories is great. This short story of his (not from the collection) is f-ed:

So, ah - if Mike Adams is to be believed, the upshot of this so-called "chemical apocalypse" is apparently going to be the human race becoming a “race of near-mutants"?

I personally avoid reading Natural News (if most of the posts are so unintentionally funny this may well change), but I can't let this one go! Its a rather strange claim* given that every human being alive has around 100 genetic mutations - be they neutral, deleterious or beneficial, as I understand it they do play some role in evolution. Of course A.M. Leroi may know a little less about science than "Health Ranger" Adams... Does Mike Adams perhaps believe evolution to be yet another conspiracy?

Also, I'm far, far too tired at the moment to search for any relevant statistics: but I really can't say I've seen any evidence of "widespread infertility in young couples" mentioned either.

Everybody was laughing at the redundant "mentally insane" in yesterday's thread, but I said to myself: 'Self: At least he didn't say "clinically insane".'. Well, in the fuller quote today, he did.

Honest to Dog, isn't there some way to send a stiff shock over the internet every time somebody uses this oxymoron? "Insane" is a legal term—you can be "legally insane" or "clinically psychotic"! </pet peeve>

Also, was it him or some other idiot who referred to aluminum as a "heavy metal"? That ought to be worth a good jolt, too.

On a more serious note (snerk), Mike is making an elementary mistake with this sort of gloom and doom rant.

If it is truly too late to rescue humanity and we're all destined to perish miserably, what's the point in reading NN articles and buying the products it sells/recommends?

I've seen this phenomenon before with the angst-ridden and terminally confused. They're inundated with so many horrific conspiracy theories, they become overwhelmed - since there's nothing they can really do about them, they begin to question whether to just turn off the shrieking and kick back with a few beers, or just go hide under the covers.

victims of Nazi genocide had their gold fillings pulled out of their mouths before they were gassed to death
Other way around, I suspect; otherwise it would give the whole game away. Mikey lacks a strong grasp on causality and temporal sequence.

At our atomic spectroscopy lab, we have confirmed trace levels of aluminum in regular atmospheric air, confirming the fact that all agricultural soils are being inundated with aluminum which is literally falling out of the sky

::deep breath::

BWAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!

As Orac pointed out; grats to Mikey for figuring out that Aluminum is EVERYWHERE. Because, you know, it's NACHERALLY there!

Dangerous @ #31: Do you HAVE ANY IDEA what might be in beer? That fizzy stuff is prolly some kind of poison...carbon dioxide is a well known killer. Oh, and watch out for them twist-off caps or the pull tabs...there's a plot in there somewhere!

Sure. I think that the product was being sold as anti-CVD - a rich source of omega-3 perhaps- from NZ
Of course the woo-bent ramp up any inkling of a hint of a possible future medicinal use up to eleventy-one as being the Panacaea Deluxe.

@ Dangerous Bacon:

Right. I wonder how many listeners/ readers feel hopeless after experiencing their infernal and ceaseless ratchetting up of fear? Esp on a day-to-day basis.

Funny but these guys also believe that *stress* causes all manner of illness- esp cancer, CVD, SMI- and their really big fear- AGING.

Which is why I drink good beer that requires a bottle opener. While I have seen bad beer without twist-off caps, I've not seen good beer with it. Besides, the standard bottles are easier to refill with homebrew.

or the pull tabs

I'm afraid you're showing your age - I've not seen a pull tab since the '80s.

According to Mikey, he *was* poisoned, like everyone else, altho' he ate what he *thought* were pure, organic, GMO-free, transplendent, edenic ambrosiae (tm) but he found out otherwise and then went on a cleansing regime ( no details given, thankfully) and began eating the real, *lab tested* purified, toxin-free essences of Nature (tm). Or suchlike.

He noticed that he became so much more clear thinking and subject to intermittently self-evocative revelations that were,yes, ABSOLUTELY brilliant! As he now remains.

I knew someone who also was subject to intermittent flashes of brilliance but it unbfortunately turned out to be a detached retina.

I took a rare trip over to NaturalNews to see how the commenters were taking this dire news, but I couldn't read past this exchange:

Meridianlink • 2 days ago
Mike, thanks for this, I have known this for a long time by observing the clinical effects in our health clinic here, but I am so glad you are able to voice this publicly. My feeling is that our best remedy is to engage metaphysical remedies, visualizing best case and engaging the unseen friends to make a shift, perhaps to change the molecular structure of glyphosate, and/or shifting the consciousness of the people involved. If they could become aware of the impact, it would change things. Maybe they need to synthesize more oxytocin.

Joy • 2 days ago
Many thanks, Meridianlink, for your wise words. I have been a healer trainer for many years in the UK and also work with energies in different ways. The beings/life-forms behind this planetary attack, working through specific 'humans', do not have the capability/creative skills to counteract high frequency metaphysical work. They need to lower the frequency of humanity in order to be able to control it, and cannot remain in high-frequency energies as it destabilises them.

Mike (and the rest of the media) keeps repeating one of my biggest chemophobia pet peeves: "There's a yoga mat ingredient in my bread!" could just as easily be "There's a bread ingredient in my yoga mat!" and the latter wouldn't prompt nearly as much outrage. Ingredients in cosmetics pop up in some very unexpected places my favorite being isobutane which is used in lip gloss and industrial lubricants.

I was going to say something snarky about "next warning, beware of silicon dioxide- it's in food *and* computer chips"... then I read Ism's comment #46 quoting the marching morons on NN, I mean wise energy crystal metaphysical world healers. *sigh* There is no room for parody any more. It's been crowded out by the uber-stupid.

Denice, its not industrial lubricants i was talking about. Its a more, erm, personal form. Bow chicka wow wow etc.
seriously the amount of dimethicone you pick up on mass spec is mind..erm..blowing. Its everywhere.
and pretty harmless.
as well as slidey.

@Denice,
I'm well aware of the innuendo those two things carry when used in the same sentence. In my social circle nothing is sacred, and my lurking has taught me that's much the same here. So have at.

If you're feeling mischievous, you could go to sites that promote yoga as quackmed (which is different to 'yoga as ordinary exercise' with no quackery attached), and post a comment about 'yoga mat chemicals,' with the URLs of other woo sites about this.

'If you're sweating whilst performing yoga, you might pick up these nasty chemicals through your skin and suffer the consequences. Anyone promoting yoga mats is clearly nothing more than a scam artist who's poisoning you with chemicals and laughing all the way to the bank.'

If you're lucky this will set off a round of crank magnetism.

Speaking of chemicals, this gem from the comments on the Mother Jones vaccine article:

'Solo_poke (reply to Becca Bankston) 3 days ago
You suffered due to the ignorance and corruption of others. I am nearly 50 and in amazing shape because I do NOT allow chemicals inside my body...
Wake up...'
9 2'

What's frightening is that the comment got 9 up-votes and only 2 down-votes. What's better is that the two comments in reply to that one said, in effect, 'Your entire body is made of chemicals, doofus!'

Whoever thought the world of our ancestors was "edenic" clearly lived a lie. I've read enough American Civil War books to know that just wasn't so. Lead and arsenic in paint, mercury in the patent medicines, and Arceus knows what in the water supply - let's just say those were dirty, dirty times.

I can imagine how horrified Mikey must have been to discover this invisible Holocaust using his new toys carefully calibrated, exquisitely quality controlled, highly sensitive analytical devices. I assume he has found that unequivocally none of his products are poisoning anyone (it would defeat the object otherwise, n'est pas?); that must be some consolation for the poor lamb.

Does he have an opinion on what to do with DHMO?

I hope so. We need his help here. Half the UK is covered in DMHO, it's everywhere, falling from the sky, coming out of faucets. Even blood samples are full of it. It's in our food, and everything we drink. As little as 2 inches of this stuff can kill. People are dying! Send desiccants urgently. And dear FSM please, no more methicone.

This is something I also posted to the Exposing PseudoAstronomy blog (& podcast), but I think that it well sums up the danger of Adams and his ilk.

Many years ago I read a sci-fi short story (Long enough ago I cannot remember the title or author, but i’m guessing it dated from no later than the 60s). In it the Earth is peaceful and pastoral and the overwhelming majority of the population is telepathic, what one knows, all know.

The small (less than 15 individuals) portion of the population that does not have the telepathic facility has been given the make work task of looking after the library that holds all human knowlege gained before the rise of the telepaths, who disdain such knowlege as ‘irrelevant’.

Then, unexpectedly a brilliant comet (I feel the author should have chosen a supernova.) appears in the night sky, and the telepathic part of the human race is seized by a massive panic attack, what one fears, all fear….

The staff of the library are given the obligatory gloat, before they get down to caming down one of the telepaths and, with the aid of an astronomy text show that the light in the sky, is neither new or threatening.

In my darker moments, this is where I fear the internet is taking the human race.

Adams is like a bright 10 year old who's been given a microscope but no knowledge of how to use it and no guidebook to what he'll see when he does. "we found Parts Per Billion!! (!!!11!) of aluminum! Parts per billion. Why not complain that the Earth is a lovely planet except for all the damn people on it.

Just like how the Bene Gesserit Sisters can transmute the molecular structure of spice poison, in that documentary ‘Dune’.

Please, Frank Herbert was making much more sense.
I tried to read twice the quoted comments from NN, and my brain just went on strike half-way through.

Although these commenters remind me of a French guru who created his own brand of church of happylology. Every night, he would destroy by the force of his mind hundreds of thousands of Earth-bound flying saucers from Pluto. One day, he discovered his own dog was a Venusian spy.

BobfromLI @39: "Do you HAVE ANY IDEA what might be in beer? "
C2H6O, which is a known toxin that kills hundreds of thousands every year and causes mental instability, difficulty in thinking and extreme suggestibility when consumed. And it's one of those damm chemicals!
WAKE UP SHEEPLE! STOP DRINKING BEER!!

Ism's comment/ quotes, like most of this stuff, made me laugh- and then made me sad.

For me, the awful thing about the worldview promoted by (and profiting) people like Mike Adams is that it's completely closed. It never has to adjust to new information; it never gets to be wrong. If Mike Adams predicts an apocalypse that doesn't come, it's not because he was wrong- it's because Mary Woo and her crystal energy spirits reprogrammed everyone's molecules, just in the nick of time!

It seems to me- and I'll let everyone know if it turns out I'm wrong- that being wrong is necessary, beneficial, and unavoidable. It's what happens when you don't know everything; it's what happens when you try to make a connection with someone who thinks differently from you; it's what happens when you take a risk, or push a
limit, or poke a border. From here, down in the muck with the fools and students and researchers, it seems horribly lonely, to be up on a cloud where you're right all of the time. Lonely, and boring, and safe as a tomb.

@68 It does make you sad, visiting the realm of the truly paranoid. How does Denise Walter stay sane?! But even worse were the comments about how maybe this "lost battle for humanity" is all for the best because natural selection will enable a few million enlightened organic feeders to survive.
Do your homework!

How do I stay sane?
Easily. Altho' I probably have a degree of hereditary immunity** I believe that tolerance can be learned and is achievable by systematic desensitivisation if planned correctly and if caution is exercised assiduously.

And here's how you do it:
- try to read or listen to a little woo every day. First you should restrict your exposure - if you want to pull your hair out or drink an entire bottle of Scotch- you've stayed too long
- increase either the time you spend each day gradually ( over months) or choose progressively more looned out woo. e.g. go from AoA to TMR to Jake.
- when your tolerance reaches 20+ minutes a day of moderately mad alt med hype, create a watch list of sites to monitor daily - follow your schedule religiously.
-eventually you will graduate to hour long sessions of reading Natural News or listening to Gary Null. If you survive unscathed for a week, you have made the grade.

Even if you are able to tolerate vast amount of steaming rubbish you must also periodically take life-enhancing countermeasures to forestall any deleterious psychological repercussions:
today I took a drive to the waterside to see what havoc winter storms have wrought- it was lovely: partially flooded roads and rotted grasses on marshes and hillsides, trees snapped in half. Observing nature opens our eyes to realities unacceptable to alties. Nature ain't always pretty and our bestest friend.
Some people swear that vodka will erase all pains associated with the observation of woo.
Read a good novel to reassure yourself that not everyone is a terrible writer, unaware of realistic human motivation and interaction or concerned only with their own genius.
AND there you go!

** generations and generations of family members in business tolerating nonsense

Look for comments by 'Thomas' and 'James Bennet,' regurgitating the usual b----- nonsense and using ALL CAPS to emphasise THE TRUTH.

Quoting the story: 'In Sebastopol Union and Twin Hills school districts, 40 percent or more of parents request personal belief exemptions, Holbrook said.' (Karen Holbrook is a public health official.)

Those districts are in Sonoma County in California, which is near San Francisco, as are Berkeley and Contra Costa, where an un-immunised university student just came down with measles and rode public transport whilst contagious.

Anyone reading this who is local to the cities mentioned, ought to weigh in on the comments on that story. The reporter's email address is at the bottom of the story so you can write to him directly.

Speaking of 'personal belief exemptions,' I'd like an exemption to the law of gravity, so I can flap my arms and fly.

With recent bursts of activity on NN including stories warning of the "dark side" of artificial sweeteners, new fluoride horrors, neurotoxin contamination of edible cactus, prisoner torture, government attempts to take over the entire news media, plus the impending loss of the global fight to save humanity, I was amused to see the following NN feature posted today:

So Mike Adams has discovered that the air is full of...dirt. We're all gonna die!!!

About half a century ago, my mother made a series of clay figurines illustrating exaggerated fear of low-level radiation for radiologist Vincent Collins. One guy huddled under an umbrella fearful of cosmic rays. One guy cringed away from radiation coming up from the ground. And one guy, the most terrified of all, stared down at horror at a radiation symbol on his own belly, representing natural radioactive isotopes within his own body.

Right. Woo-meisters ramp up fear about diet and health as well as about the economy and social conditions ENDLESSLY and then tell us that stress causes illness.
Which of course can be ameliorarted with proper nutrition, exercise and breathing techniques.
Then they sell you supplements and relaxation tapes. Which you play after viewing their "Toxic Apocalypse 2014" and "Economic Ragnarok, 2015" and "Fascism Reborn, 2016" videos.
I swear, Null has a 10 tape series about fascism being
offered as premium for radio listeners.( see WBAI website)

Headdesk. I live in the bland, provincial, beigeness known as Santa Rosa. Usually the Press Democrat comments section is full of flag-waving, racist, anti-immigrant, Mexiphobic spew. Now it's full of the aforementioned spew and anti-science, batshit cray-cray. I pity the few, brave souls who have tried to sound reasonable in the comments. Engaging the cretinous Bennet and his ilk is pointless . . . of course, I did anyway.

Those clay figurines sound cool!
Maybe there should be one inside a plastic bubble to protect against neutrinos, which come from all directions.

Also, it's a good thing there is dirt in the air, because we need the dust particles as a precipitation focal point to start forming rain drops. Unfortunately, we need a lot more of that nasty DHMO here in the southwest as well.

squirrelelite -- Unfortunately, a plastic bubble won't protect you against neutrinos. You're constantly being irradiated by neutrinos from the sun -- even at night, because they pass unimpeded through the body of the earth!

Nothing to fear, though, since they proceed to pass through you, too, without depositing any energy or causing any damage.

-Most- will pass through you; very occasionally one will interact with the nucleus of an atom, causing it to transform into a different element. Though the odds are remote, this could potentially happen to DNA, and probably has happened a few times in history. Therefore, we can be sure that neutrinos cause CANCER and that the neutrino apocalypse is surely upon us. But do not fear, simply purchase my book "The Neutrino Detoxicification diet; 200 holistic quantum recipes to protect you against toxic frequencies", and you will be able to keep your family safe while War, Famine, Death and Pestilence ravage the lands with GMO chemtrails. (can you blame me? I'm a terrible cook - how else am I going to sell a recipe book?)

Mikey, never one to rest upon his laurels, today instructs his ardent followers about the twelve "potentially life-threatening mistakes" that survivalists and food preparedness obsessionalists make.

When the Great Culling begins, water and food will become scarce and PURE water and foods will be virtually non-existent. If you've already stored tons of packaged foods you might believe that you are indeed "out of the woods" BUT you think wrong(ly). Possibly DEAD wrong.

Your canned foods could be dodgy and laden with heavy metal, radiation and GMOs; your water could be problematic; defending your stores may not be the first issue that popped unbidden into your mind; the seeds you may depend on could be difficult to maintain; did you remember to stock fertiliser, barter goods and bullets? Oh, you didn't. Then tough luck, hombre.
If you live in a city, well, you're already DOA.

Mike will enlighten you about the strategies you require to keep your family, your property and yourself safe and sound through these apocalyptic times . He'll be testing storable food and heirloom seeds for toxins as well as offering his new supplement which will counteract radioactive cesium.

See the new adv... *news stories* coming soon to Natural News- your one stop shop on the internet to satisfy all of your largely imagined, fear-driven needs.

You're right, palindrom.
But, umbrellas don't help much against cosmic rays.
It's more an expression of where you expect the thing you fear to come from. And since neutrinos can go right through the Earth without interacting with a single atom, they can be coming from any direction. Hence, the plastic bubble which covers in all directions.
But, over course that is way TMI.

Personally, I'd worry more about a gamma ray burst pointed in our direction. Those things are NASTY! But, fortunately there don't seem to be any stars big enough to cause the effect that are close enough for us to worry about.

Still, it's about as logical as most of the foolish worries about minute quantities of poisonous chemicals or toxins that keep getting repeated in the anti-SBM media.

I am a lubrication analyst, I review lab data and manage the lubricant health of machinery important to the health and safety of the public. So I read waiting for this to pop up

"we have confirmed trace levels of aluminum in regular atmospheric air, confirming the fact that all agricultural soils are being inundated with aluminum which is literally falling out of the sky. "

In my machines, indeed in the standard spectroscopic analysis of almost every oil sample, we monitor for aluminum. In my case, we have only a few machines with any aluminum components. The source is well known in the Predictive Maintenance world. The Earth itself.

If I see Aluminum, I think dust.

So, if I sampled air tightly enough, I would expect to see aluminum in air, given that I have I have chased the source other trace elements at some expense and difficulty to their source. Coastal air.

After reading Orac for the last year or so, I'm finally incensed enough to comment.

Mr Adams can just f**k right off about Kyiv (Kiev in Russian, Kyiv in Ukrainian). The reason people are pissed there is because their president had the balls to steal SO much money from the country. Google 'Yanukovich house' and see some of the photos that come up. And check out some of the bookkeeping that was found by the journalists there. There's a receipt for a $12,000,000 US cash change of hands (yep, 12 million dollars!). And receipts for his furniture, which cost more than the whole education budget for the country. And the 2-kg bread-shaped paperweight made of solid gold.

It hard to tell how much time the bread mixture is given. In commercial bread making, especially for fast food restaurants, the total bread rising and baking time is usually significantly less than 45 minutes. Yes, aluminum exists naturally and so do all the other contaminants and like mercury and lead. That being said, it doesn't mean that after industrial companies pollute the soil they can plant crops over it, then sell those crops to the public without consequences. These contaminants are obviously concentrated enough that certain crops are absorbing way to much.

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